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  • Medicine and Literature: The Doctor's Companion to the Classics
  • Jeffrey Mifflin
John Salinsky . Medicine and Literature: The Doctor's Companion to the Classics. Abingdon, U.K.: Radcliffe Medical Press, 2002. vii + 236 pp. £19.95 (paperbound, 1-85775-535-9).
Cecil Helman , ed. Doctors and Patients: An Anthology. Abingdon, U.K.: Radcliffe Medical Press, 2003. viii + 162 pp. £19.95 (paperbound, 1-857-75993-1).

Considerable interest has centered recently on the idea that physicians and medical students would do well to set aside time for recreational reading, and especially for interaction with the great works of literature, including novels, short stories, and poetry. Elective courses designed to expose students to the benefits of literature have popped up at many schools in England and the United States. Harvard Medical School, for example, offers one course in "Literature, Art, and Healing" and another called "Narrative Ethics: Literary Texts and Moral Issues in Medicine." The Aesculapian Room at the school's Countway Library provides space and books for medical students who want to broaden their perspectives through exposure to the humanities. The "Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database" maintained on the World Wide Web by New York University directs medical personnel to recommended films, paintings, and works of fiction. The University of North Carolina publishes iris, a journal dedicated to the idea that creative arts can stimulate meaningful discourse about illness, wellness, and disability and increase the practitioner's capacity for understanding. In this context, several books about physicians and literature aimed primarily at medical readers have been published.1

John Salinsky's Medicine and Literature brings together columns previously published in the quarterly journal Education for Primary Care. Salinsky, a British doctor with a lifelong passion for great books, wrote many of the columns himself and invited friends to contribute other pieces. The book is not an anthology, but rather a compilation of plot summaries with personal commentaries. It includes summaries and analyses of five works dealing directly with scenes from medical life, and twelve others that (surprisingly) have no direct relationship to medicine. [End Page 176] An introductory chapter and a final chapter outlining suggested approaches for teaching are also included; the author's rationale for encouraging medical students and doctors to read great books is well expressed (pp. 1-7), and his description of possible classroom procedures is sound (pp. 221-29). His taste in literature is first-rate. "Does the wisdom and insight of the great writers help me to a greater understanding of human emotions and behavior?" he asks; "I hope so and would certainly maintain that a writer like Tolstoy . . . can tell you more about what it is to be human . . . than any number of textbooks of psychology or handbooks of psychotherapy" (p. 3). The book, however, falls short of expectations in several important respects: Many of the works discussed have only a tenuous relationship to medical issues. The stories are told, with unnecessary asides, in a chatty, colloquial style intended to engage modern students whose educational background has been primarily scientific—but the effect is often more off-putting than inviting. In addition, the detailed plot summaries disclose too much and could easily have the unintended and unfortunate effect of discouraging potential readers from going on to read the originals.

Cecil Helman, a London-based physician who has published his own fiction and poetry, takes a more successful approach in Doctors and Patients, an anthology of short pieces of literature and excerpts from longer works. All sixteen selections focus on medical encounters, some from the physician's point of view (about half of the contributors are doctors) and some from the patient's. The editor prefaces each selection with a brief introduction, setting context and providing the reader with hints about what to look for. Contemporary works are included as well as classics. The book is divided into three sections ("Doctors," "Patients," and "Clinical Encounters"), and basic themes are tied together by a thoughtful introduction (pp. 1-14). The volume, Helman explains, "is a celebration—sometimes a nostalgic one—of a unique and archetypal relationship: a healing bond between doctor and patient. . . . In our modern technological world, however, this relationship is changing rapidly...

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